


Variant

by orphan_account



Category: Terminator (Movies), Terminator: Judgement Day
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Found Family, Gen, Not Beta Read
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-18 11:34:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21610234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: She pressed the remote back into its remaining hand. "Stay," she echoed. "Please."
Comments: 3
Kudos: 40





	Variant

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first work here so be gentle please! i would appreciate some constructive criticism though as im planning a series of these oneshots

_ "It's over." _

_ "No. There is one more chip, and it must be destroyed." _

_ "No!  _ **_No_ ** _!" _

_ "I'm sorry John. I'm sorry." _

_ "It'll be okay... Stay with us!" _

_ "It has to end here." _

_ "I  _ **_order_ ** _ you not to go!" _

_ "I know now why you cry, but it's something I can never do." _

  
  


Sarah realized now what her son had seen almost from the beginning. She saw why he had bothered teaching it slang and high fives and how to (sort of) smile. He cared about it.  _ And it cared about him, too.  _

She wanted more than anything to be rid of this nightmare she and her son had lived through once and for all, but as she watched John and the battered T-101 embrace each other, she was hit with another realization: she couldn't do it. So when it turned to her, she pressed the remote back into its remaining hand. "Stay," she echoed. "Please."

  
  


The T-101 looked at the remote dumbly for a few seconds before tossing it aside. It didn’t say anything, but its eyes bore into her accusingly. “You’re making a mistake,” they said. She met its gaze with one just as fierce.

John watched this silent exchange with red eyes, and when the T-101 finally broke eye contact with Sarah, he grinned up at it with relieved exhaustion. “Guess you’re stuck with us, huh?”

"It would appear so.” Sparing one last glance for the molten steel below them, the three limped out of the steel mill, pausing only to wrench what they could of the T-101’s arm out of the gears that had crushed it. They managed to slip into a car about a quarter mile down the road just before police sirens came flying past them. Once they had all sat in the car for a minute, catching their collective breath (metaphorically, in Bob's case) John piped up from the backseat.

"Maybe I could drive? I mean, both of you have got a busted leg, and Bob here's missing an arm sooo... how 'bout I give it a try?"

He deflated at the pair of disapproving looks trained on him and muttered under his breath as he slid down further into the tan seats.

They set off, Sarah in the driver's seat and the T-101 in the passenger's. They drove for as long as Sarah could stand to, but eventually the pain in her shoulder and her leg was becoming too distracting to be safe. She grit her teeth and bore it for a half hour longer than she really should have when they drove by a boarded-up house a few hundred feet from the road. 

"Stop here. I sense no other human presence in a two-mile radius beyond through-way traffic." Sarah, happy to comply for once, pulled the car around to the back of the weather beaten house and gathered up a half-awake John from the backseat while the T-101 broke inside. It was relatively empty on the inside, save for a few old wooden chairs and a card table in what Sarah presumed to be a living room. But beggars can't be choosers, and the floor was surprisingly clean for a shady, boarded-up hovel on the side of a highway.

Although they were all exhausted-- at least, the humans were exhausted; Sarah wasn’t sure if a machine could even  _ get  _ exhausted-- they took the time to address Sarah’s wounds and to put a few bandages over the T-101’s worse spots. John talked to her constantly about his old friends, his foster parents, his favorite video games all while stitching her up, not caring much if she actually responded. Though Sarah was watching the Terminator clunkily repair its arm more than anything else. The patient steadiness of its movements was fascinating and oddly soothing. 

"All done, Mom." Sarah gave him a genuine, if a little tight, smile. "All right Uncle Bob, your turn."

The machine paused in its methodical repairs for the first time in half an hour. Sarah wasn't sure, but as it looked up from its half-shattered arm, its expression appeared to be one of mild confusion. "I do not require any medical assistance, John Connor."

John rolled his eyes. "Just because you don't need something doesn't mean it isn't nice to have it. Now be still."

It set aside its makeshift tools of scrap metal and endured question after question as John wrapped up the side of its face and a few other places where its metal endoskeleton poked through. Most of John's queries went right in one ear and out the other, but one in particular piqued Sarah's interest.

"Do you know everything Skynet knows?"

"No. We are not connected in a neural network or otherwise. We are programmed with certain knowledge, subroutines, and missions but are sometimes permitted a small capacity for learning new information."

"Skynet doesn't want you getting wise and going off on your own, huh?"

"Defective, rogue, or obsolete models are targeted for termination."

"Jeez."

The machine nodded its head solemnly. "Jeez."

  
  


The house was pretty quiet after that beyond the scraping of metal and cars passing by on the highway. 

Sarah and John sat together on the floor, John up against her good shoulder and her up against the wall. John was on the brink of sleep and obviously fighting it. And she let him. For a while, anyway. Half an hour went by before she finally said something.

"Go to sleep John," she said. "I'll wake you up in the morning." He didn't even protest before curling into her side and falling asleep almost immediately. 

Sarah continued monitoring the patient progress the T-101 was making on its arm. Occasionally, it would stop its repairs to flex its metal tendons or bend its disfigured elbow joint only to be dissatisfied and pick up its tools again. After several minutes of this, it spared her a glance. "You should rest as well, Sarah Connor. Humans are not capable of functioning at maximum efficiency without approximately eight hours of sleep." 

It must have seen the hesitation in her face, though, because it continued on. "I will keep watch. I will wake you if there are any problems. If not, I will wake you when eight hours is up."

"Easier said than done," she murmured. She was asleep as soon as she shut her eyes. It was dreamless for the first time in years.

  
  


Sarah woke about an hour after dawn, sore as hell. John was still asleep next to her, but he had turned in the night and was now slumped against the wall. She slipped away from him as quietly as she could and crossed the room join the T-101 at the card table. She saw that it had not changed its position since she had fallen asleep. 

It broke its gaze away from the boarded up windows to look at her. It spoke quietly so as not to wake John. "There are 152 minutes left in your eight hours." She rolled her eyes and it gazed forward once more.

"Were you able to fix your arm?" She gestured at the table littered with scrap metal.

"Yes." It raised its new arm while curling and unfurling its metal fist. "But it is approximately seventeen percent weaker than the original." It brought the arm back down to the table.

"Oh. You..." Sarah faltered. But now was as good a time as any to ask what had been at the back of her mind for the past forty-eight hours. It turned its head slightly in her direction. "John switched your chip to read-write mode, didn't he?"

"Yes."

"So you can think for yourself now, can't you?"

"Define 'think'." Sarah chewed on her bottom lip as she tried to think of an adequate answer. John was so much better at this than her. 

"Thinking is like- it's when you decide things for yourself. Or when the voice in your head-- your conscience, I guess-- tells you what to do instead of taking orders from anybody else." It considered this answer for a long time.

Sarah was counting the dust motes illuminated by the gaps of sunlight peeking through the windows when the T-101 spoke again, slow and deliberate. "Based on those parameters, I am capable of 'thought'." For the first time since she had met it, the T-101 seemed utterly unsure of itself. "I have no subroutines that detail how to figure in 'thoughts' when calculating a course of action."

"Well, how did you make decisions before, then?"

"I was programmed to follow certain mission parameters. My decisions were all limited and based on these specifications and the most efficient way to follow them." Behind them, John began to stir.

Sarah smiled faintly at the cyborg. "You'll learn how to wing it. We all do, eventually." 

It deemed an impassive stare at her out of the corner of its eye as a good enough response. Sarah took that as her cue to end the conversation and focused her attention on her son. 

Even when John had been little, she had never taken the proper time to be his mother. She had felt too burdened by her task of training him to be John Connor, Leader of the Resistance. The weight of three billion people was quite a bitch on your conscience. Still, there were a few moments in which she had simply taken the time to be a mom that she had stored away somewhere: John’s first steps, when he had ridden a bike on his own for the first time, his homemade seventh birthday cake with badly frosted Transformers on the top that had made him grin and grin and grin. She added this one to her collection, memorizing the patterns of sunlight on his untroubled face. 

He was safe. She was safe. They had taken down Skynet. It was over; Judgement Day was over before it even had a chance to begin. For the first time in thirteen years, Sarah Connor had a real choice of what to do with her life.  _ Here's to not fucking it up,  _ she thought and shook her son awake.

  
  
  
  



End file.
